1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to creating different types of documents which can be distributed in different ways. More particularly, the present invention relates to a system that can be used to create and distribute different types of documents that are based on variable content and/or variable layout.
2. Description of Background Art
A document is defined by two principal characteristics: content and layout. Content can include the broadest possible spectrum of text, numerical data, artwork, images, graphics, and symbols. Layout is generally defined as the spatial arrangement of content on a two-dimensional surface (such as a page). This two-dimensional surface can itself be arranged together with other such surfaces as part of a set of pages (such as a magazine or book). Page sets can be further arranged into sets of page sets (such as volumes), possibly including additional dependent elements such as covers, tables of contents, and indexes.
Traditionally, content and layout have been specified manually. A writer or artist created content, and a graphic designer or paste-up artist arranged the content into a page layout (also known as formatting). Recently, software has been created to help people perform some of these tasks. For example, writers can use word processing programs such as Microsoft Word, and artists can use graphics programs such as Adobe Illustrator, in order to create content. Graphic designers and paste-up artists use page make-up software such as Adobe InDesign to manually create layouts.
Notwithstanding the incremental improvements in efficiency offered by these software tools, the process of creating and formatting documents has remained essentially a manual process, relying on the skill and judgment of a human operator. Even when a document requires a change in only one of the two principal characteristics (e.g., new content within a fixed layout or fixed content within a new layout), existing software offers little or no support. When both characteristics change, human intervention is required, which severely restricts the speed, efficiency, and scale with which complex customized documents can be created.
While some software applications support the mixing and matching of content and layout to produce rudimentary substitution of content, such as the merging of mailing addresses or the replacement of account data in billing statements, these applications are highly specialized and support neither highly-variable content nor highly-variable layout. Each layout must be used with a particular number of content objects, and the content objects must be of a particular size and/or shape.
Because current methods—even those based on software—are so heavily dependent on human intervention and control, the potential for integrating simultaneous streams of diverse content from multiple sources and making complex layout choices is necessarily constrained by the limits of human ability. In addition, given the difficulty of monitoring and controlling human input on a comprehensive or systematic basis, the reliance of current methods on human intervention dramatically complicates and increases the cost of supervising production and ensuring quality in large-scale production of customized documents.
What is needed is a document creation system that can define the content and/or layout of a document automatically based on rules or algorithms with little or no user input, interaction, or intervention. With such a system, a layout would be dynamically defined for each document based on the content that was selected (and possibly also based on some high-level design decisions). The system would replace the artistic, aesthetic, and subjective tasks currently performed by people. Since these tasks are not mechanical, it is very difficult to automate them. However, the successful development of such a system would yield a broad range of economic and social benefits.